Diane Arbus

Last week, “Diane Arbus Revelations,” a traveling retrospective of the influential mid-century photographer, opened in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In October 2003, Jim Lewis reviewed the exhibition, which was then at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lewis wrote that Arbus was an iconoclastic “collector of freaks and outcasts,” but her “pious and solemn” depiction of these subjects rendered them less powerful than they might have been had she portrayed them with “even a touch of lightheartedness and vulgarity.”